ROCHESTER, N.Y. (AP) — City officials agreed to pay $12 million to the children of Daniel Prude, a Black man who died after police held him down until he stopped breathing on a snowy street in Rochester, New York.
A federal judge approved the settlement in a court document filed Thursday. Rochester Mayor Malik D. Evans said in a statement that the agreement was “the best decision” for the city.
“It would have cost taxpayers even more to litigate, and would have placed a painful toll on our community,” said Evans, who wasn’t in office when Prude died in March 2020.
The settlement money, minus lawyers’ fees and costs, will go to Prude’s five children, who are heirs to the estate, attorneys said.
“I think that it’s an amount of money that is sufficient to show that the City of Rochester recognizes that something very bad happened and that it’s very important for the city to put it in the rearview mirror and move forward,” said lawyer Matthew Piers, who represents the administrator of the estate.
The agreement is the latest in a number of settlements involving police killings of Black people in the U.S. in the last decade. Among them: a $27 million agreement with the family of George Floyd and a $12 million settlement with relatives of Breonna Taylor. Their 2020 deaths — his in Minneapolis, hers in Louisville, Kentucky — ignited protests around the country and fueled a reckoning on racial justice and policing.
